Teletext at Nova

Demoparties
are computer art festivals, often spanning a whole weekend. They feature
demos,
whose purpose is to show off computer graphic art, music and
programming skills. Highly-skilled, tightly-knit
demo groups work together to
squeeze performance out of old and new computer hardware, often
employing clever hacks, in order to produce amazing audiovisual effects.
These demos are shown on a big video projector connected to a sound system
in view of the artists, musicians, coders, and other attendees sitting at
benches in a large hall, though there is often plenty of socialising
in other rooms or even outdoors.
The demos are voted on by everyone attending at the end of the party, and
the authors of the demos which left the biggest impressions are celebrated
as winners at a prize-giving ceremony.
Since the 1980s, a culture has grown up around all this called
the demoscene, though its roots go back before even
that.

2017 was the most recent year that I went to the Nova demoparty
in Budleigh Salterton. I was visiting with my friends from the
CRTC demo group, with which I was more or less involved.
With the agreement of the organisers, we
were trialling teletext graphics as a new competition, a sort of
rather British variant of the ASCII and ANSI art competitions. We
weren't sure about how that would fit into the scene culture at first,
but people responded to it really well, and we got
six entries that year
for the competition. To give some idea of what a demoparty is like,
have a look at the teletext compo being shown on the big screen in
this archived stream.
Steve —
now with an impressive scene CV —
won that year with
Dragon and Castle, even
though it bent the rules by using a special extra large version of edit-tf
that I hacked up on the Saturday, allowing 200 lines in the frame rather than
the usual 25.

Munching on a pizza, I was idly sofa-scening yesterday
— that is, tuning into the party's video stream from home
— to see how it was going for
Ruairí, h0ffman and
the team. I was pleased and
surprised to see that the teletext competition was still a part of Nova
and has been held ever since 2017, with compos in
2018
(with archived stream)
and
this year, 2019
(with archived
stream).
Nova accepts remote entries, so I'd
really encourage anyone out there playing with a teletext editor and making
nice things with it to send in an entry for Nova 2020 and keep teletext going
in the demoscene.